Digital music is already a remarkably easy thing to consume, as far as entertainment goes — or anything else for that matter. It’s pretty much everywhere you look, so long as you only look at things that have screens. But when it comes to providing a “lean back” experience, meaning that the consumer is left to consume passively rather than “leaning forward” to seek out what they want actively, Automatic DJ takes the cake.

If you have a face, and use Facebook, you can make a party-worthy personalized playlist with Automatic DJ by simply standing in the right place at the right time. (Bonus points for leaning back.)

According to its creators Ben Gleitzman and Brian Brennan, Automatic DJ leans on a whole heap of APIs to work its magic:

Face (facial recognition -> Facebook)

Hunch (Facebook -> music recommendations)

The Echo Nest (music recommendation -> more danceable music recommendations)

Spotify (more danceable music recommendations -> streamable track[s])

Boxee (wrapping the whole thing in something pretty)

All of that trickery adds up to a really neat app that, using no input other than a picture of your face, can generate and play a dance-optimized playlist to express your musical taste to an entire party’s worth of people — not bad for a day’s work at Music Hack Day New York.

Gleitzman and Brennan designed this “passive music selection system” specifically for parties, which is a fine idea because it’s one of the best party tricks we’ve ever seen.

Unfortunately, though, you’ll need to be a bit of a hacker yourself to use it. The source code is available on GitHub.